


something wretched, something weary

by WhoopsOK



Category: Darkwood (Video Game)
Genre: Banned Together Bingo, Body Horror, Dissociation, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Introspection, Mild Gore, Mutation, POV Second Person, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:42:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28178583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhoopsOK/pseuds/WhoopsOK
Summary: Everything is so messed up now, you know this isn’t how evolution is supposed to work. It’s not supposed to come out of thin air, quick enough to witness the change in one lifetime. It’s certainly not supposed to come out of a syringe.(The Stranger's memories aren't completely intact, but they know things aren't meant to be like this.)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9
Collections: Banned Together Bingo 2020





	something wretched, something weary

**Author's Note:**

> BTB fill for "Evolution", but like…I cheesed it, because I passed bio but only on the way to getting a BA.
> 
> This game is something else, if I wasn’t so chickenshit and easily frustrated I’d play it myself.
> 
> Title from “This Body” by The Dear Hunter

You remember your biology teacher, but you don’t remember bits of them correctly.

The class probably wasn’t overly remarkable, not any more than any other, but you still think you should remember the _teacher_. Their name, at least, maybe, but that escapes you as thoroughly as their face does, a blur of differing noses and eyebrows from a dozen different faces you’ve also mostly forgotten. You think you’ve gotten their skin tone right, but you’re really having trouble repeating _Mister Mix Missus_ in front of a variety of names, none of which sound right. For some reason, sometimes your mind really fixates on their hands; the movement of their wrist writing on the board, the fact that they were clean, the crevices of their knuckles when they handed you back your tests. You passed those, generally speaking. Or at least, if memory serves, which it usually doesn’t.

Everything is so messed up now.

The thought makes you adjust your scarf to cover more of your face—or, the face you have now, anyway. You try not to recognize yourself in it, you don’t want to claim too many pieces of this body. It’s hardly _yours_ at this point. The Elephant says you breathed too much of the contaminated air here to even own your soul, let alone your body. Maybe your biology teacher wouldn’t recognize you either, would forgive you for letting trauma purge them from your memories.

Forgiveness is sort of a pointless venture in the Woods, though. You didn’t get blood on your shovel from burying anybody.

It’s a little funny, you think sometimes, as you step around poisonous mushrooms and greedily shove all others into your pocket, a different kind of poison:

Who would be angrier about you defying biology like this—Mother Elephant and her Book or your mostly-forgotten-likely-dead biology teacher?

There was a lesson about mutations when you must’ve been, what, fifteen? A lifetime ago even if it wasn’t, not really. You’re not sure how many years have passed since nobody could make it out to the high school, but your memories of graduation are so murky you’re not even sure it’s _your_ graduation you’re remembering. If you can’t even get that straight, what’s it matter if you can’t remember a _tenth grade class_? There’s no way they’d have been able to explain where the fuck phylogenetics went wrong and shat out _banshees_.

Everything is so messed up now, you know this isn’t how evolution is supposed to work. It’s not supposed to come out of thin air, quick enough to witness the change in one lifetime. It’s certainly not supposed to come out of a _syringe_.

The word ‘genotoxins’ exists in your brain, but it’s not attached to any helpful memories. You don’t know if they can be magic. They’re probably not supposed to be fast, either, though.

The pain doesn’t _feel_ fast, but when you stand in your cottage, cooking mutagens over a rickety old stove—and thinking about how you feel like a drug addict, who’s only hope is in a dirty needle—you can’t really find it in yourself to care. You need to see further or you’ll run into savages or dogs or step in another goddamn trap and get torn apart by _chompers_. You need to run faster or when you slip up, because you do and will, they’ll catch you anyway. You need to scream, you really, _really_ need to fucking scream, because you haven’t heard your own voice in years and everything is _so fucked up_ , you need to _scream,_ it doesn’t even matter who it scares off.

If to get that, you have to give yourself a dozen purulent track marks and collapse, writhing in pain until the latest nightmare makes you blackout, then—well.

There ain’t much worth looking at here, anyway. And you know for a fact there are worse ways to die than completely unaware of the world around you.

You have yet to be that lucky. You wake up, always; with shaking hands, unable to swing your weapons as hard as before, having to swallow more and more pills to heal the damage of the previous day. But you wake up. You wake up, get up, and keep moving.

You’re gonna make the woods regret letting you do this to yourself.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading…waking up is victory, I’m proud of you


End file.
